Beyond numbers, coverage and cost : adaptive governance for post-COVID-19 reforms in India

Crisis as an opportunity for change has been part of historical and development literature and is an oft-repeated theme. The Chinese word for crisis (危機), for example, consists of two symbols often characterised in popular literature as denoting ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.1 For India’s healthcare system, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the urgency of reform. We have learnt that no matter how long or how stringent a lockdown is, we cannot flatten the curve effectively, nor fairly, without a robust health system. In the pre-COVID-19 world, practitioners and policy-makers were gathering around the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) agenda that sought to expand the number of health services provided to the largest number of beneficiaries at the cheapest possible cost, constituting the three dimensions of UHC.2 This pandemic has made it clear that incremental progress along those three dimensions while necessary, is insufficient to move towards a health system that is responsive, resilient and fai

Adult Circadian Behavior in Drosophila Requires Developmental Expression of cycle, But Not period

Circadian clocks have evolved as internal time keeping mechanisms that allow anticipation of daily environmental changes and organization of a daily program of physiological and behavioral rhythms. To better examine the mechanisms underlying circadian clocks in animals and to ask whether clock gene expression and function during development affected subsequent daily time keeping in the adult, we used the genetic tools available in Drosophila to conditionally manipulate the function of the CYCLE component of the positive regulator CLOCK/CYCLE (CLK/CYC) or its negative feedback inhibitor PERIOD (PER). Differential manipulation of clock function during development and in adulthood indicated that there is no developmental requirement for either a running clock mechanism or expression of per. However, conditional suppression of CLK/CYC activity either via per over-expression or cyc depletion during metamorphosis resulted in persistent arrhythmic behavior in the adult. Two distinct mechanisms were identified that may contribute to this developmental function of CLK/CYC and both involve the ventral lateral clock neurons (LNvs) that are crucial to circadian control of locomotor behavior: (1) selective depletion of cyc expression in the LNvs resulted in abnormal peptidergic small-LNv dorsal projections, and (2) PER expression rhythms in the adult LNvs appeared to be affected by developmental inhibition of CLK/CYC activity. Given the conservation of clock genes and circuits among animals, this study provides a rationale for investigating a possible similar developmental role of the homologous mammalian CLOCK/BMAL1 complex

Can green tribunals help to resist neo-liberalism in environmental governance – The case of India

Establishing the environmental rule of law has been identified as a precondition to achieving sustainable development. Increasingly however norms around environmental sustainability are being eroded by rising neoliberalism. Within countries, especially developing countries these trends are creating tensions for environmental policy-making that often require adjudication/judicial intervention. In this paper, we use the case of the National Green Tribunal (NGT), situated in a rising economy - India to understand how it operates amidst these tensions, restricting our analysis to pre-COVID-19 to minimise confounding effects of the pandemic. We find that the limited jurisdiction allows the NGT to continue to uphold the principles of environmental sustainability. The NGT is able to serve as an indicator of the kinds of environmental issues cropping up, deliver environmental justice and improve governance. However, there are visible tensions driven by the larger political economy of environmental policymaking in India that pose a significant systemic challenge to the effectiveness of the NGT. Given the resurgence of economic imperatives in post-pandemic policymaking, the NGT and other similar environmental courts/tribunals across the globe, need to draw on sources of strength established pre-pandemic to uphold environmental rule of law going forward